Abstract
Imagine this story: under the gaze of the unjustly and now perpetually censored animal, the god of poetry murders his wife and breaks his “mynstralcie” (267).1 This chapter argues that the metaphoric tableau of the Manciple’s Tale seems to relate the lesson that narrative subjectivity will remain apocalyptically isolated from the nonmale and the nonhuman. The story could then ominously conclude Geoffrey Chaucer’s story about stories, the Canterbury Tales, effectively establishing or at least sustaining Derrida’s “abyssal” limitations of human subjectivity for subsequent English texts. But the tale has more to offer, and the offending crow is the clue to its potency.
As with every other bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human… And in these moments of nakedness, under the gaze of the animal, everything can happen to me, I am the child ready for the apocalypse…
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), p. 12.
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Notes
All Chaucer citations are from Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), by line number.
A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), pp. 118, 116.
This is not a new notion. See for example, Brian Striar, “The Manciple’s Tale and Chaucer’s Apolline Poetics,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 33.2 (Spring 1991): 195–96.
Michael Kensak, “Apollo exterminans: The God of Poetry in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 98.2 (Spring 2001): 143–57.
Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 157.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 213.
See Cary Wolfe for his discussion of subsequent philosophical interest (that of Hearne, Cavell, Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida, Heidegger) in animal language, Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003), pp. 1–57.
Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 89.
For the compelling challenges posited by the arts, see Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993).
For an account of how we “created” our scientific “facts” about the nature of animals, see Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Many fine studies on this little tale are available. The ones cited in the following discussion most closely support the argument at hand. See also Stephen D. Powell, “Game Over: Defragmenting the End of the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 37.1 (2002): 40–58.
Marianne Borch, “Chaucer’s Poetics and the Manciple’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 25 (2003): 287–97.
John Hines, “‘For Sorwe of Which He Brak His Minstralcye’: The Demise of the ‘Sweete Noyse’ of Verse in the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 25 (2003): 299–300.
Eve Salisbury, “Murdering Fiction: The Case of the Manciple’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 25 (2003): 309–16.
Stephanie Trigg, “Friendship, Association and Service in the Manciple’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 25 (2003): 325–30.
and Warren Ginsberg, “The Manciple’s Tale: Response,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 25 (2003): 331–37.
Patrick D. Murphy, “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics,” Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, ed. Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry (Albany: State U of New York P, 1991), p. 49.
See Catherine S. Cox, “The Jangler’s ‘Bourde’: Gender, Renunciation, and Chaucer’s Manciple,” South Atlantic Review 61.4 (1996): 1–21.
and David Raybin, “The Death of a Silent Woman: Voice and Power in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 95.1 (1996): 19–37.
Michaela Paasche Grudin, “Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale and the Poetics of Guile,” Chaucer Review 25.4 (1991): 330.
He concludes on a more positive note than I do, finding that the tale of the Manciple “reaffirms the power of poetry and lends elevated status to the poet and his voice.” See Striar, “The Manciple’s Tale,” 173, 182, 197. See also Mel Storm, “Speech, Circumspection, and Orthodontics in the Manciple’s Prologue and Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Portrait,” Studies in Philology 96.2 (Spring 1999): 109–26.
Carolynn Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2006), pp. 97–104.
Louise Fradenburg, “The Manciple’s Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales,” English Literary History 52 (April 1985): 95.
John J. McGavin, “How Nasty Is Phoebus’s Crow?” Chaucer Review 21.4 (1987): 444–58.
Celeste A. Patton, “False ‘Rekenynges’: Sharp Practice and the Politics of Language in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” Philological Quarterly 71.4 (Fall 1992): 403; Storm, “Speech,” 117–19; and Raybin, “The Death,” 32.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” (1975, 1976), trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 1953–54.
Sheila Delany, “Slaying Python: Marriage and Misogyny in a Chaucerian Text,” Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 66–69; see also Patton, “False,” 403.
Delany, “Slaying,” p. 51; see also Raybin, “The Death,” 21; Fradenburg, “The Manciple’s,” 102; and Priscilla Martin, Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 227.
Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 6th ed. 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1961, 1967), p. 54.
Richard Spears, Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, Homosexual Lingo and Related Matters (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David, 1981); see also Delany, “Slaying,” p. 69.
Delany, “Slaying,” pp. 69, 70–73; Patton, “False,” 399, 411–13. See also Cox, “Jangler’s,” 1–3; and Peter W. Travis, “The Manciple’s Phallic Matrix,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 25 (2003): 317–24.
In her discussion of how profane or animal love is associated with the wife (thereby condemning her to the bestial), Delany notes that the tale abounds in animal imagery, both in the link before and during the course of the story. She finds animal images in lines 40, 44, 71–72, 77–78, 130–38, 255, 163–86. Delany, “Slaying,” p. 50. See also Raybin, “The Death,” 23–30; Charles A. Owen, Jr., “The Falcon’s Complaint in the Squire’s Tale,” Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, Peter C. Braeger (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), p. 183.
Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 215–16.
Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), pp. 67–73.
Susan Crane, “For the Birds,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society (29) (2007): 33–36; and Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, pp. 204–05, 213–15.
See Stephen Knight, Rhyming Craftily: Meaning in Chaucer’s Poetry (1973; rpt. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P, 1976), pp. 181–82.
See Peter C. Herman, “Treason in the Manciple’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 25.4 (1991): 318–28.
See Jamie C. Fumo, “Thinking upon the Crow: The Manciple’s Tale and Ovidian Mythography,” Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism 38.4 (2004), 355–75. See also Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, pp. 206–19.
See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955; rpt. 1973), Book 2, ll. 539–636.
See Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991), p. 290; and Storm, “Speech,” 119–26.
For an extended treatment of “quiting,” see Iain Macleod Higgins, “Tit for Tat: The Canterbury Tales and ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,’” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16.1 (2004): 165–202.
See also Delany, “Slaying,” p. 68; Striar, “The Manciple’s Tale,” 176; and F. N. M. Diekstra, “Chaucer’s Digressive Mode and the Moral of the Manciple’s Tale,” Neophilologus 67.1 (January 1983): 134.
Cf. Marie, Fables, pp. 62–65; and Odo of Cheriton, The Fables of Odo of Cheriton, trans. and ed. John C. Jacobs (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1985), pp. 149–50, 74–75.
The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1901), Liber Tercius, ll. 783–817.
Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), p. 55.
See Jacqueline Miller, “The Writing on the Wall: Authority and Authorship in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Chaucer Review 17.2 (Fall 1982): 95.
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© 2011 Lesley Kordecki
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Kordecki, L. (2011). Mythological Censorship and the Manciple’s Tale. In: Ecofeminist Subjectivities. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337893_6
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